Installing to a USB Flash Drive – DSL Wiki

From within Windows Note: This guide assumes that your USB Flash Drive is “F:”. Please replace “F” with the correct drive letter. There are two methods. For either method, you will need: * A USB flash drive (also called flash disk, pendrive, USB stick…) * Download “dsl-embedded.zip” from http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/download.html (49Mb – The Torrent is recommended, and is often the fastest) [edit]Method I 1. Format your flash drive, from cmd.exe (the “DOS” window) type: FORMAT F: /fs:FAT32 2. Unzip “dsl-embedded.zip” to your flash drive (you could use the “Extract all files” built into XP with the destination as “F:\”) 3. Download Syslinux – Syslinux can also be used by various other platforms, such as Unix. 4. Go to a command prompt and run syslinux for your drive from \win32\syslinux.exe typing:SYSLINUX -ma F: 5. If you are running Windows Vista, remember to start cmd.exe as Administrator, otherwise the normal cmd.exe won’t be able to access the MBR of your USB drive. 6. reboot. Note: Booting from USB may or may not work on your computer, mostly dependent on its age and bios setup. Some systems may have problems booting from USB drives formatted as FAT32. Changing the format step toFORMAT F: /fs:FATmay allow DSL to boot.